


sing me like a choir

by jinlian



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9072919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlian/pseuds/jinlian
Summary: The post-episode 7 fic I never wrote, when Yuuri and Victor finally find themselves alone. There are conversations to be had in touches instead of words, on lips and tongues that say nothing at all.When Yuuri was twenty, Phichit caught him kissing the framed poster of Victor Nikiforov he had brought with him to Detroit.





	

When Yuuri was twenty, Phichit caught him kissing the framed poster of Victor Nikiforov he had brought with him to Detroit.

 

_This isn’t what it looks like_ had been the only possible defense, and in Yuuri’s defense, it _hadn’t_ exactly been what it had looked like. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been kissing a framed picture of his figure-skating idol and undeniable celebrity crush: that much had, unfortunately, been true. But he hadn’t been making out with it in an embarrassing sexual fantasy. Yuuri had been sad.

 

That hadn’t been the justification that Phichit had been expecting, and he’d stopped his teasing there, from where he’d been leaning against Yuuri’s bedroom doorframe with one hand over his heart and one across his forehead in a dramatic recreation of what was apparently Yuuri’s swooning fancies. Yuuri remembers pushing the frame face-down against the rumpled blue sheets on his half-made bed, pressing each corner down, wondering if it would even be possible to break it here if he just kept pushing hard enough. The frame, of course, never broke. So Yuuri had been left sitting there, ignoring the sharp, burning warning behind his eyes of mortification and shame, with his roommate still staring and the image of Victor Nikiforov still dancing in his mind.

 

“If he knew I’ve been trying to skate like him all this time,” Yuuri had finally said, “he’d hate it.”

 

The rest of the story had revealed itself in pieces like the choreography Phichit had begun to practice for his new free skate, in slow steps that had to be spun and repeated over and over to make sense of them. He’d been able to gather, as he’d moved slowly to sit next to his roommate and place a hand over Yuuri’s shaking ones, that Yuuri had not had a particularly good day. He’d been late for his ballet class, a misstep in oversleeping his daily post-morning-practice nap. Already flustered by this—Yuuri _liked_ ballet, certainly more than Phichit (his feet already took enough of a beating in ice skates; he didn’t need that in ballet shoes), and he hated disappointing any of his instructors—he hadn’t been able to focus well. This hadn’t been helped by his being put on the spot during class as a result of his lateness. So when he’d shown up at the rink for evening practice and some one-on-one with Celestino, naturally, Yuuri hadn’t been in the best mental state. In his own words, that practice had been a disaster.

 

“We all have bad days,” Phichit had assured him, as gently as he could without patronizing. “But, Yuuri… why would you say that about Victor?”

 

Yuuri had taken a moment before he answered. He’d nearly chewed through his lower lip, cracked and half-bleeding partly from his nervous habits and partly from the cold Michigan winters. Beneath his hands the overturned picture frame rose just an inch as he released the pressure—just enough to let it rest without his help where he’d placed it against the covers. “Because,” he’d said, “I’ll never live up to him.”

 

He hadn’t meant it as the kiss it had turned out to be, really. Upset as he was, Yuuri had taken the frame, tried to find his usual inspiration in the arch of Victor’s neck, in the way his arms lifted perfectly towards the corners of the poster with purpose through to every fingertip. He just hadn’t found it. _Help me, Victor,_ had been all Yuuri could think, and he’d fallen back against his pillows with closed eyes and pressed his mouth to the cool, hard glass of the frame.

 

When Yuuri kisses the real Victor Nikiforov, he falls back for it, too. Except this time the only the only thing cool and hard is the ice against his spine, and Victor himself is the one doing the kissing. The real Victor leaps into life in a way the Victor from the posters never did, bursting past boundaries Yuuri rarely even acknowledges that he keeps, hot and joyous and messy. In a way, perhaps this kiss shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. It’s exactly like everything that Victor _is,_ even though Victor’s nose bumps Yuuri’s cheekbone so hard that he wonders if Victor is all right. Even though Victor’s lips don’t fit perfectly against Yuuri’s, catching only their corners in his hurry. Even though hundreds of people are here to witness it. 

 

It’s wholly, utterly unexpected. And it happens so quickly that Yuuri hardly has time to process that it’s happened at all. 

 

Unlike Phichit those hundreds of people do not allow Yuuri the time he needs to sort it through, placing each thought in a sequence before he makes sense of it in one whole story. Phichit, for his part (how fitting that he’s here for this kiss after all the rest), asks for more out of Yuuri with only a look, his eyebrows raised as they find each other through the flash of cameras and the shouts of reporters across a crowded room. Yuuri shakes his head, and Phichit nods and lets it go. In his place instead it’s Victor this time who has his hands on Yuuri’s, one arm wrapped gently around his side, always steering Yuuri away from those prying questions: “Yes, we’re happy with his performance today, he’ll certainly win gold at the Rostelecom Cup with his quadruple flip,” and no, he doesn’t have any more statements to make on further questions. Each interview is finished before it can be asked. Yuuri is grateful; he hardly even has to speak. And except for the medal ceremony, Victor never once lets him go.

 

Yuuri feels a little like that poster frame from Detroit. He’s pressed against Victor’s chest, every sharp edge cushioned by something much softer, much warmer. Victor’s fingers twitch on Yuuri’s arm, and Yuuri remembers the feel of them in his hair, cushioning his skull were they crashed together to the ice. There’s a rhythm to his touches that Yuuri has begun to learn over the past few months; he focuses on them now, closing his eyes to everything but the feeling of staccato notes against his body, a silent rehearsal just for him. Victor brushes his thumb across the back of Yuuri’s hand, squeezes his fingers all together. He rests his chin on top of Yuuri’s head. He trails a hand down the curve of Yuuri’s arm and murmurs a few words meant only for Yuuri’s ears. This, Yuuri knows, despite the cameras and crowds and the headlines he will surely read tomorrow, belongs only to themselves.

 

They remain this way in the cab ride back to their hotel. Victor’s presence is only a quiet hum against Yuuri from where he pulls them together. His voice, deep and steady, vibrates on his lips and through his throat, follows the rhythm that he beats out with each tap of a finger on Yuuri’s hands. Yuuri knows him well enough by now to know when Victor is irrevocably happy—and though he doesn’t quite understand exactly how it’s happened, he knows that he’s the one who made him so. 

 

Yuuri twists in his seat. His seatbelt tugs a little too hard against his neck as he cranes his head back to look up at Victor and strains to see him through the thin-flying blinks of the streetlights that pass outside the taxi window. For a moment, each flash highlights every feature on the face Yuuri has grown to know so well: the sharp lines of Victor’s nose and chin, the way his hair sweeps just so across his eyes, the tiny scar on his lip that no poster had ever captured without first brushing it away. There are shadows on his face that aren’t always so flattering. Yuuri finds this dimension of Victor so much more gratifying to consider, because it tells him so much more than he could otherwise ever know from the smoothly tailored lines of a photo.

 

He doesn’t realize that Victor has curled his fingers beneath his jaw, tilting Yuuri’s face closer in their awkward tangle in the car. There’s a question in it, and Yuuri breathes in, interrupted from his study. 

 

“Did you know I’d never even tried a quadruple flip before you became my coach?”

 

Victor laughs. Yuuri flushes through his smile, awash in the sound that lights up the back seat so much more than the overhead streetlamps ever could. 

 

“Not even as my fan?” Victor asks, and Yuuri’s smile grows wider.

 

“Well, I’d thought about trying it. It always occurred to me when I was learning the choreography for your free skate last year. But I figured, well, I shouldn’t do that when the quads I _could_ do were embarrassing enough. I just knew I could at least rotate it this time.”

 

Victor drops his chin, and this time Yuuri sees the kiss coming, broadcast in the near-imperceptible flutter of Victor’s eyelashes and the twitch of his fingertips against Yuuri’s face. Yuuri is ready for it, and he accepts it. Victor smooths out all hurry of their last kiss—this time he simply brushes against Yuuri’s just-parted lips, as though asking permission and making sure he expects it before he closes against the upper curve of Yuuri’s mouth, everything soft and warm and slow.

 

This time, Yuuri closes his eyes and simply marvels at the moment.

 

“You did well,” Victor says in a voice that barely breaks a whisper, crawling low from his throat into the dark solitude of the backseat of their cab. “I’m glad you knew it. I’m glad you did it. You’ve shown your coach just how much he has to learn, if he hopes ever to keep up with you.”

 

It’s about as much of an apology as Yuuri ever expected to get, and it’s enough. He turns back around in his seat, missing the feeling of Victor’s hand on his cheeks and lips on his mouth even as he settles back against his chest instead. Victor drops a hand to Yuuri’s stomach instead ( _He doesn’t want to let go,_ Yuuri realizes with a thrill—and a late realization, considering that Victor has hardly let go of Yuuri once during the last few days they’ve been in China—) and rests his chin just so on top of Yuuri’s head.

 

So natural. So comfortable. So _right._

 

“You don’t mind officially changing the last jump to the flip from the toe loop? Even though it means we’ll have to spend time in practice focusing on landing it instead of on refining my choreography?”

 

“I’d be disappointed in you if you _didn’t_ want to change it now,” Victor says mildly, and Yuuri can feel the emphasis on that statement with another kiss brushed against his carefully-brushed hair, now escaping from the pins that keep it pulled away from his face during competitions. “I know better what I should expect from you, so I won’t go easy on you until I see the full extent of your potential. We’ll work on it together. You’ll land it next time, Yuuri.”

 

The way he says it so easily, with no room for doubt, pleases Yuuri almost more than anything else he has ever heard Victor say. 

 

———

 

They don’t speak any more during the remainder of their short ride back to the hotel, sitting instead in that still, comfortable silence. There’s plenty that Yuuri _wants_ to say, certainly, and he has a feeling that so does Victor: Victor, whose hands never quite stop moving, writing measures across Yuuri’s skin and clothes, whose breathing sometimes stops for a few breaths until Yuuri looks up to see him staring into nothing, lost in thought but for each shift Yuuri makes within his arms. But neither of them seem to find the words. Their moment in the taxi spills onto the street when they open the doors, hits the cold air that wraps up around them, and Yuuri steps with Victor back out into the world. 

 

The elevator ride up is only a brief exchange of checking for their room keys and what time they ought to set their alarms for the morning. And Yuuri notices, as he watches Victor swipe the card to the handle before it swings wide open, that the other man’s hands seem to shake.

 

Unconsciously Yuuri reaches out to take them. Victor stills, and the door swings shut behind them with a heavy clunk as he turns to look at Yuuri with a slightly startled look behind the upward curve of his smile that hasn’t fallen from his face since he met Yuuri at the kiss-and-cry. “Do you want to take the shower first?”

 

Yuuri shakes his head. “No. Victor—I just want to say thank you.”

 

And he pulls Victor with him—away from the door, Victor’s scarf dropping to the floor behind him as Yuuri backs all the way to the bed nearer the window, his legs hitting the mattress and Victor’s eyes not leaving his once with every step. Yuuri’s heart pounds out a melody: loud and uneven, ringing thunderously in his ears. He lets go of Victor’s hands, grabs a fistful of blankets behind him instead, and Victor’s coat slips next from his shoulder to the ground. There’s a curious look on Victor’s face, an expression that Yuuri has never seen before with his eyes half-closed and his mouth halfway open before Yuuri is aware once again that they are kissing, and Victor Nikiforov is moaning a sigh against his lips.

 

Twenty-year-old Yuuri could not have imagined this. He couldn’t have imagined it, first because a poster is nothing like the real thing, and then because the thought of kissing _Victor Nikiforov, Russian figure-skating legend_ comes nowhere close to the reality of kissing _Victor,_ his inspiration, his coach, the man who’d caused him to break down into ugly bawling tears in the emptiness of a garage just a few hours ago. Victor smells like expensive cologne, and Yuuri can taste the lip balm on him, familiar from the time he’d worn it himself at the regional qualifiers. Each kiss is more insistent than the last, Victor pressing him further and further into the mattress, mouth parting and tongue dipping and Yuuri drinking in every touch. _“Yuuri,”_ Victor breathes, and Yuuri refuses to answer, declines to let himself wonder what this— _any_ of this—might even mean.

 

_“Yes,”_ he whispers instead, because this is enough; for now, all of this is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I reached a follower milestone recently and opened to requests, if any of my followers had any, and this is the first of a few to come. 
> 
> (One day I'll write a fic without long sentences and descriptive lists, but it is not this day)
> 
> You can also find this on [my tumblr](http://jinlian.tumblr.com/post/155002343812/sing-me-like-a-choir).


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